Monday, June 2, 2014

To Name the Genre

Recently
I’ve heard, read, and participated in discussions of what to call this peculiar
genre of ours, the one that many readers find so intriguing and exciting. Some aficionados
refer to it simply by what many consider its primary component—horror, with (as noted on several panels
I have served on) careful emphasis on the final syllable.

The
name falls handily on the lips and offers an immediate guideline as to what
readers might legitimately expect: blood and gore, the grisly and the gruesome,
mayhem and monsters of all ilk. The name—along with the almost mandatory black
cover—provides book sellers and book buyers a recognizable kind, directing both to the appropriate shelf, usually in the nether
reaches of the store. On the whole, it serves as a handy moniker.

In
some ways, though, horror seems a
misnomer, a simplistic way to describe a complex kind of writing. If one were
to state that Stephen King’s The Stand
or Robert McCammon’s Stinger is
horror, such a contention would be only partially true of those novels and
would leave out hundreds of novels that do not resemble those two at all yet
are demonstrably horrific.

Certainly
alternative terms exist: dark fantasy, which
I used frequently when addressing academic audiences that might have
automatically bristled at the mention of horror;
speculative fiction, which would
undeniably include horror but which would also include much more; dark speculative fiction, which seems
more to point out the difficulties in naming than resolve any of them; dark fiction, which would again include
more than is conventionally intended by horror.
Additional possibilities might include supernatural
fiction, weird fiction, monster fiction, slasher fiction, and the
cumbersome all-in-one of dark
psychological suspense thriller. None of them define precisely the same
approach to writing, and none of them quite work as a comprehensive identifier
for this particular brand of writing. But then, apparently, neither does horror.

Using
that single term as an umbrella label for such widely divergent novels as
Stoker’s Dracula and Jeff Strand’s A Bad
Day for Voodoo would be roughly equivalent to re-thinking The Lord of the Rings and simply calling
it Frodo. Frodo is central to the key
action, the destruction of the ring of power; and he does appear in a number of
episodes, perhaps more than any other character. But as important as he is, his
personal story cannot encompass the complexity of the whole. He does not
destroy the ring, although he makes its destruction possible; he does not
restore kingship to Middle Earth, although he does facilitate that restoration;
he cannot fully redeem the Shire for himself after Sharkey’s depredations,
although he makes possible Sam’s fulfillment as husband and father.

Similarly,
to call a novel horror and expect it
to provide horrors on every page would be like calling a play a tragedy and expecting the emotional intensity
implicit in the term to show up in every line, every scene. Such a compression
of powerful feelings would simply be too much; no audience would be able to
endure it. Shakespeare was well aware of the unviability of constant,
uninterrupted tragic power and consistently provided comic undercurrents to
alleviate the strain...and paradoxically make the catastrophe that much more
compelling, that much more cathartic. Hamlet
without the grave-digger scene (as it is so frequently produced nowadays)
becomes merely a litany of death without providing Hamlet the opportunity to first
reconcile himself to its inevitability. Macbeth
without the porter and his incessant “Knock! Knock! Knock!” devolves into a chaos
of murder.

For
all of these reasons—and no doubt more—a number of “horror” writers have chosen
to set aside horror in favor of yet
another alternative, referring to their works as cross-generic fiction.

The
first time I heard the term was during a conversation with Dean Koontz some
twenty years ago. He had graciously agreed to speak to one of my classes at
Pepperdine, and afterward we talked at length about him, his writing career,
and his books. I had brought along several for him to autograph and, when I
opened Phantoms (1983) to the title
page, he tapped it and told me that that one had been his “break-away book.” When
I asked what he meant by that, he began discussing it, not as a horror novel
but as his first conscious effort to mix and merge genres.

In
a new afterword to Phantoms, he
writes at length about precisely what he meant by that and how the novel
affected his career: “Writing Phantoms was
one of the ten biggest mistakes of my life, ranking directly above the incident
with the angry porcupine and the clown, about which I intend to say nothing
more.” The mistake, he continues, lies in the fact that that novel, more than
any previous one, earned for him the label of “‘horror writer,’ which I never
wanted, never embraced, and have ever since sought to shed.”

More
to the point, he says:

I
believe, however, that 95 percent of my work is anything but horror. I am a suspense writer. I am a novelist. I write love
stories now and then, sometimes humorous fiction, sometimes tales of adventure,
sometimes all those things between the covers of a single volume. But Phantoms fixed me with a spooky-guy
label as surely as if it had been stitched to my forehead by a highly skilled
and diligent member of the United Garment Workers union—making a far better
wage than that poor bastard crocheting license-plate cozies.

Because
his previous novel, Whispers (1981),
had been marketed as horror and had been a marked success, his publishers
pressured him to produce another in the same mold:

I thought I would cleverly evade their
horror-or-starve ultimatum by making Phantoms
something of a tour de force, rolling virtually all the monsters of the genre
into one beast, and also by providing a credible, scientific explanation for
the creature’s existence…. Phantoms
would be a horror story, yes, but it would also be science fiction, an
adventure tale, a wild mystery story, and an exploration of the nature and
source of myth.

Phantoms does in fact provide a paradigm for
cross-generic fiction:

·It
has a monster; therefore it is horror;

·It
has a developing relationship between two characters; therefore it is a
romance;

·It
looks directly to the past for information and themes; therefore it is
historical;

·It
has a lawman pursuing an evil-doer; therefore it is a police procedural;

·It
has several chases, an apparent burglar, and missing jewels; therefore it is a
thriller;

·It
has a moment of hesitation before the monster is defeated—will it win or will
it die?—and therefore the novel is suspense;

·It
has a murderer and a victim; therefore it is a murder mystery;

·It
has a scientist equipped with the latest cutting-edge apparatuses nudged
slightly into the future; therefore it is science fiction;

·It
has characters following clues to discover the underlying causes of an event;
therefore it is detective fiction;

·It
has a distinctive landscape, one recognizable to anyone familiar with the
general area; therefore it is regional fiction;

·It
deals with the disintegrating mental state of several characters; therefore it
is psychological fiction;

·It
persistently ties the story to contemporary life; therefore it is realistic
fiction;

·It
speaks of and through a sentience beyond human understanding; therefore it is a
story about aliens, i.e., again science fiction;

·It
points out occasions when the creature has interacted with humanity throughout
history, imprinting itself on human memory as eternal and immortal and
simultaneously sifting through human memory to find appropriate guises in which
to appear; therefore it is mythic;

·It
deals with characters that become larger than life and an enemy that potentially
threatens the existence of all humanity; therefore it partakes of the epic;

·It
has a dog in it (what self-respecting Dean Koontz novel doesn’t?); therefore it
is dog fiction;

·It
deals in philosophical abstracts; therefore it is philosophical fiction;

·It
covertly affirms the existence of the Devil, and thereby of God; therefore it
is theological fiction.

And
on. And on.

Of
course, much of what I just listed is intended to be taken at least partially
as tongue-in-cheek. Each item is a single element
in a long, coherent, unified novel; and none—including horror—deserves to be elevated into the sine qua non of the story. To do so would result in a much narrower
book, in several cases something along the lines of a novella or a short story.
No single item could control the story without much of importance being lost.

Yet
to remove anything from the list
would also lessen the novel. Phantoms
is an enduring story—as well as a bestseller—precisely because Koontz took
great care to include as many audiences as possible. Those readers approaching
it looking for horror will be gruesomely pleased by graphic, nauseating, gooshy details in passages such as the
following:

Blisters formed,
swelled, popped; ugly sores broke open and wept a watery yellow fluid. Within
only a few seconds, at least a ton of the amorphous flesh had spewed out of the
whole….The great oozing mass lapped across the rubble, formed
pseudopods—shapeless, flailing arms—that rose into the air but quickly fell
back in foaming spasming seizures. And then, from still other holes, there came
a ghastly sound: the voices of a thousand men, women, children, and animals,
all crying out in pain, horror, and bleak despair.

For those less
interested in the visceral, there is the intellectual excitement as the
characters systematically anatomize their enemy—literally and
figuratively—struggling to place it within some knowable taxonomy of creatures.
For others, there is a marriage and honeymoon at the end, and the promise of a
restored family unit.

In short, there
is something for everything…for every reader, for every interest.

That
is, I think, one of the strengths of Dean Koontz’ stories…and of King’s, and
McCammons’, and great numbers of books by a great number of writers who are
usually passed off as simply writing horror.
By themselves, horror motifs may not be strong enough to carry the weight
of a novel. Joined with elements of other kinds of fiction, horror becomes part
of a deeper, richer texture that, by means of monsters-as-metaphors and
horrors-as-emblems, come to reflect the parallel depth and richness of human
experience.

Yet
cross-generic fiction itself fails to
encapsulate the essence of a kind of story telling that does have as its
ultimate aim a physiological reaction, a frisson
along the spine, a coldness in the blood, a hesitance to turn the lights off
after reading late at night. Perhaps the term is too clinical, too objective to
direct attention to one of the most passionate and in many ways the most
subjective modes of storytelling. It almost demands an intellectualization that
monster stories struggle to subjugate to visceral responses.

Is
the term horror the best possible
label. Perhaps not. Is it the most appropriate, given the alternatives? Perhaps
not. But I think that until someone invents a shorter, crisper, more convenient
and more appropriate label than cross-generic
fiction, one that will indicate a similar interest in storytelling from
numerous perspectives that still has
the possibility to chill, it may have to serve by default.

[This essay was recently published in Dark Discoveries 27 (Spring 2014). Please look at the issue for more fascinating insights into horror and its practitioners.]

1 comment:

Great post Michael. It makes me think of how writers are told to "brand" themselves and how that sometimes it happens to us regardless f what we might prefer.

I've noticed that when I look at Amazon's "people who bought your books also bought books by these authors" that in my opinion, I typically would not say I am even writing anything to terribly close to those other authors, but one collection leaning this way or that swings the whole persona that way.